Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf came from a wealthy intellectual family that had numerous contacts with literary figures. As a teenager, she experienced Victorian restrictions on girls and women. She was an early literary critic and essayist; her career as a novelist began in 1915 with the novel The Voyage Out. By the late 1920s, she was a successful and internationally known writer. Woolf was rediscovered in the 1970s, when her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own became one of the most cited texts of the new women's movement. With her avant-garde work, she ranks alongside Gertrude Stein as one of the most important authors of classical modernism.